African Americans sought to fight as soldiers from the earliest days of the Civil War. Black men realized they had a considerable stake in the conflict that they and others of their race knew was about slavery from the start. Hence, many were eager to join the struggle to destroy slavery by enlisting in the Union army.

Indeed, this martial impulse preceded the war. A recent edition of Disunion in the New York Times has a relevant piece in this regard by Van Gosse. Gosse reminds Times readers about black service in previous conflicts (especially the War of 1812), the existence of private black militia groups in the antebellum North, and the fact that a handful of African Americans–despite federal policy in 1861–had managed to join the Union army. He writes in Disunion:

Despite these strong claims, few whites in the North in late 1861 supported the idea of black soldiers. And virtually all of them were abolitionists and/or Republicans in the party’s radical wing. But in Fall 1861, the cause of black enlistment in the Union army gained an important new supporter: Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s Secretary of War. Cameron was a seeming improbable convert, by reputation not an idealist but a corrupt schemer and opportunist. Historians have long speculated that Simon Cameron embraced the idea of black soldiers not because he sincerely believed in the concept, but because he cynically sought the political support of the radical Republicans in Congress to stay on as Secretary of War despite his mismanagement of the War Department. Whatever his motivation, Cameron over the course of Fall 1861 pushed for enlisting African Americans as soldiers within Lincoln’s cabinet and in top political circles in Washington, D.C.

Cameron’s promotion of this issue climaxed in late November/early December 1861, when the Secretary of War tried to slip language into his annual message to Congress promoting the recruitment of contraband slaves as Union soldiers. The relevant passage read:

Cameron was emboldened by the fact President Lincoln had acquiesced earlier that fall to service of contraband slaves in the Union navy. If slaves could serve in the navy why not in the army? Yet the Secretary of War was missing an important distinction. As historian John Niven put it:

For Lincoln, black sailors was a sufficient gesture in late 1861 to placate the radicals, while avoiding the then intolerable political cost associated with black soldiers. So the President refused to approve the Secretary of War’s language for his report to Congress supporting the enlistment of black soldiers. Cameron defiantly retained it even after Lincoln and the cabinet had rejected it, seeking a fait accompli by sending his version of the report off to the printer. Abraham Lincoln responded to this bold move by ordering Cameron’s printed report to be recalled and reprinted with more innocuous language on how the War Department planned to utilize African Americans. Nonetheless, Cameron’s draft made it into the newspapers, revealing in public an embarrassing rift within the Lincoln administration over the sensitive issues of emancipation and black military service. This public rift sealed the Secretary of War’s fate and by mid-January 1862, Simon Cameron had been replaced by his legal adviser, Edwin M. Stanton.

But although Abraham Lincoln could silence a dissenter within his administration, he could not suppress the ideas of emancipation or black service in the army. Given his effort underway by that time to enact gradual compensated emancipation in Delaware (see Civil War Emancipation for November 29), the ever canny Lincoln obviously realized that fact. His annual message to Congress indicated publicly his support in general terms for the plan privately he by then was seeking to enact in Delaware. The relevant section read:

So by December 1861, Abraham Lincoln for the first time started moving publicly toward emancipation. But it is also clear at that point, he believed freedom for the slaves should come gradually, with owners compensated at least indirectly and ex-slaves leaving the United States to settle in some yet-to-be-determined location to be acquired for them by the federal government. But he would not be hurried on the issue, as Lincoln demonstrated yet again that he would not tolerate members of his government who defied him publicly to do more, more quickly on emancipation and related issues such as black enlistment in the Union army, whether they be a prominent general, like John C. Frémont, or member of his cabinet, like Simon Cameron.

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com